Sunday, August 24, 2008

Café Hot Dogs

Day: 332
Budapest Rest Day 1


We slept in this morning after having a bit of a fitful sleep. A drunk guy in the next apartment spent an hour or so moaning and buzzing the doorbell trying to get his buddies to let him in around 2:30 am. He finally went away, or his friend let him in, or he passed out in the staircase. Bottom line is he finally shut up. We had our little apartment to ourselves this morning and had a leisurely breakfast of coffee and cereal. We slowly got ready and went to look for a café for a cappuccino and a croissant. Leslie was looking for a café reputed to be the local hangout of the Budapest intellectual crowd. I was bummed because I had forgotten my t-shirt that reads ‘Talk to me, I’m smart.’ Luckily we didn’t find it so we had to settle on a cool little spot in the theatre district. It made for good people watching and Leslie thinks she maybe finally had a cappuccino to knock the old #1 off of the list. That one was from a little café on the Great Ocean Road in Australia. After some proper caffeine we decided to play super tourist and take a bus ride around Buda and Pest. The bus tour was set up to be a hop on, hop off type, but as we got to our first stop and saw the driver turning people away we decided that were here to stay. The tour was surprisingly thorough and we took a lot away from it. The basic gist of the city is it has been created, pillaged and bombed for around 1000 years. WWII took care of the city’s bridges across the Danube, but the city persevered and rebuilt most of the bridges just like the originals. All in all, quite educational. We finally decided to hop off in the Jewish quarter of the city where several thousand Hungarian and other European Jews sought refuge during the war. We both were hungry and sat down at the first café we saw. The special was frankfurters or grilled sandwiches. We both opted for the frankfurters and had a really nice meal. Leslie joked that we were having café hot dogs or ‘lips and a-holes with a view’. I wanted to title the blog the latter, but decided against it. We then worked our way over to the train station where we lined out some tickets for a train to Zagreb, Croatia on Sunday. We had to buy one ticket for each of us and two tickets for each of the bicycles. After our Bangkok train experience, we know what kind of questions to ask and don’t mind buying the bikes a ticket.
Tomorrow we are off to one of the cities famous baths and then a tour of the park.
I am sure there will be more cafés in our future.
CK

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